As an introduction to portfolio assessment, we would like to share one teacher's experiences and recommendations. Barbara reflected on and discussed her experiences using portfolios in a middle school French I class for two consecutive academic years.
Planning
Portfolios take a lot of planning to set a very clear purpose before introducing portfolios to the students and parents. My purpose was to provide evidence that students were recognizing and taking advantage of opportunities to see, use, learn about, and experience French culture outside the classroom. I also needed to set goals; mine were developing enthusiasm for the language and developing life-long learning skills. My hidden agenda was to get parents and the community involved in the children's learning.
I think it is crucial to prepare thoroughly and spend a lot of time with students introducing portfolios. During the first three days of the school year I spent a lot of class time talking about the structure and expectations of the class. I gave the students handouts on concerns, needs, and definitions and told them to share these with their parents and to refer to them throughout the year.
If you are going to use portfolios, start slowly. The first step is having students collect everything they do in a folder. After a while, you can start giving portfolio days, on which students work on their portfolios by revising, adding self-assessments, annotating and organizing. Later, I let the students pick one day of the week to work on portfolios; they chose Friday. I had them give me a written plan of action and a goal on each Monday preceding the portfolio Friday. The students who had not submitted this note were given assigned work. By the fourth quarter, I did not make them give me the cards, because they had learned how to set goals by themselves.
While the students were working on their portfolios, I worked with individual students and gave mini-lessons when difficulties and questions came up while they were working. I would announce to the class that I was giving a mini-lesson in a corner on one of the blackboards. If they did not want the information, they could keep working. They really liked the mini-lessons.
Portfolio contents
I required work in each of the four language skill areas, but each student had to decide how to demonstrate these skills. Listening was very difficult to assess; I tried to take into account what they listened to, for how long, and what they learned from the listening experience, not how much they had actually understood of what they had listened to. For example, one student found a French-language radio station, so I made tapes from that and lent them out to students. They had a hard time understanding, but my teaching point was that even if a student had understood very little, he had learned something about his learning. In this case, we talked about developing strategies for listening. In the area of writing, I started by asking for a paragraph or more for each assignment; this length increased over time. Some students simply could not do this (the students in the class were from the general school population and included main streamed special education students), so we talked about it as a class, so that there would be no sense of "why does that student not have to do this." We discussed the fact that everyone has learning strengths and weaknesses. I tried to turn this potentially difficult situation into a positive experience in which students actively participated in self- and peer-assessment and reinforced their identity as a community of learners.
Evaluation
I believe in having clearly set and adhered to criteria and in being very honest with students about their work and its acceptability. In the first quarter, I set the criteria myself because the students had no experience with that. At the beginning of the second quarter, we talked about portfolio criteria and defining criteria and then voted on the criteria for that quarter. I kept the criteria that all four skill areas be represented, and students chose effort, organization, planning, and "going further than you thought you could" as criteria. This gave them responsibility for learning and self-assessment.
I included conferences in my portfolio evaluation. In the first quarter, I required all the students to have a conference with me. This was very time consuming, so in the second quarter I required students with last names A-K to have conferences and made them optional for all other students. In the third quarter, I had conferences with all the students who had last names between L-Z and made conferences optional for all the other students. In the final quarter, I arranged with my principal to have covered release time for an entire day, so that I could have a conference with each student.
Parental involvement
Students were also required to have a portfolio conference with a parent each quarter before they gave me the portfolio. Parents were supposed to write a paragraph about the portfolio/conference. I did not grade portfolios which did not contain these parent paragraphs. In situations in which there was no parent present, I let students have a conference with an adult relative or another teacher. If students reported that their parents had no time, I called the parents and encouraged them to have a conference with their child, and this worked. I also offered a parent workshop on portfolios at the beginning of the year to inform parents of the agenda and why and how to get involved.
Outcomes
Creating portfolios shows students what they are good at and what they need to work on. Self-assessment is an important skill learned through portfolio use. The students learned how to look for specific criteria that made their work acceptable or not. In the beginning, students would just rate a piece "good" or "bad" but have no idea why; in the end, they had learned how to judge their own work and how to revise it. I am an enthusiastic supporter of portfolios, and by the end of the year all the students had bought into portfolios, too. Five of the students ended the fourth quarter one year above level, most were on level, and there were two or three strugglers.
What is Portfolio Assessment?
Portfolio assessment is the systematic, longitudinal collection of student work created in response to specific, known instructional objectives and evaluated in relation to the same criteria. Assessment is done by measuring the individual works as well as the portfolio as a whole against specified criteria, which match the objectives toward a specific purpose. Portfolio creation is the responsibility of the learner, with teacher guidance and support, and often with the involvement of peers and parents. The audience assesses the portfolio.
Portfolios have generated a good deal of interest in recent years, with teachers taking the lead in exploring ways to use them. Teachers have integrated portfolios into instruction and assessment, gained administrative support, and answered their own as well as student, administrator, and parent questions about portfolio assessment. Concerns are often focused on reliability, validity, process, evaluation, and time. These concerns apply equally to other assessment instruments. There is no assessment instrument that meets every teacher's purpose perfectly, is entirely valid and reliable, takes no time to prepare, administer, or grade, and meets each student's learning style.
Foreign language educators need to able to choose and/or design assessments that meet their most important instructional and assessment needs and which they have the resources to implement and evaluate. Below are some strengths of portfolio assessment, seen in contrast to traditional forms of assessment. Traditional assessment vs Portfolio assessment
Traditional
Portfolio
Measures student's ability at one time
Measures student's ability over time
Done by teacher alone; student often unaware of criteria
Done by teacher and student; student aware of criteria
Conducted outside instruction
Embedded in instruction
Assigns student a grade
Involves student in own assessment
Does not capture the range of student's language ability
Captures many facets of language learning performance
Does not include the teacher's knowledge of student as a learner
Allows for expression of teacher's knowledge of student as learner
Does not give student responsibility
Student learns how to take responsibility
Why use portfolio assessment?
Portfolios are a form of alternative/authentic assessment in which a student's progress is measured over a period of time in various language learning contexts. Portfolios can include evidence of specific skills and other items at one particular time and language performance and progress over time, under different conditions, in all four modalities (reading, writing, listening, and speaking) or all three communication modes (interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational). Using a combination of testing instruments lends validity and reliability to the portfolio.
Portfolio assessment is closely linked to instruction, which has two educational benefits. First, linking assessment to instruction means that you are sure that you are measuring what you have taught. Second, portfolios reveal any weaknesses in instructional practices. For example, if the purpose of the portfolio is linked to making progress toward all areas of the National Standards, and, at the end of the marking period, there are no works related to oral communication in the portfolio, the teacher may decide to incorporate more oral communications work into the curriculum. This is a way of providing for systemic validity.
Portfolio assessment is by nature incorporated fully into instruction: there is no time lost on assessment. Assessment is a true learning experience, and not external to the learning process.
Student assessment portfolios promote positive student involvement. As students create their portfolios, they are actively involved in and reflecting on their own learning. Increased metacognition has a positive impact on a student's self-confidence, facilitates student use of learning strategies, and increases the student's ability to assess and revise work. Student motivation to continue studying and succeeding in language learning tends to grow in such an environment.
Portfolios offer the teacher and student an in-depth knowledge of the student as a learner. This means that the teacher can individualize instruction for the student. Weak areas can be strengthened and areas of mastery built upon. Learners are involved in this process of tracking their learning and can take control of their learning.
Using portfolios introduces students to an evaluation format with which they may need to become familiar as more schools and districts adopt portfolio assessment.
Using assessment portfolios gives the teacher opportunities to involve parents in their children's language learning. Parental involvement is an important factor in educational success
Student's Portfolio
Electronic portfolios that use digital storage processes have largely replaced the more traditional paper type as the need to present not just information, but sound, motion, and color has become the standard. Whether in the many varieties of digital format, such as DVDs, CDs, the Internet, personal websites, flash drives, or printed on paper, portfolios are used in almost every aspect of communicating personal information. Regardless of the format used, many people, especially students and teachers, seeking to understand the need for, or use of portfolios, require information. Be aware though that bad information presented in the most dazzling electronic format is still, well, bad information. Portfolios are collections of student work representing a selection of products that represent specific student performance. Portfolios in classrooms today are derived from the visual and performing arts tradition in which they serve to showcase artists' accomplishments and personally favored works. A portfolio may be a folder containing a student's best pieces and the student's evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the pieces. It may also contain one or more works-in-progress that illustrate the creation of a product, such as an essay, evolving through various stages of conception, drafting, and revision. Many teachers are using portfolios in all curricular areas. Portfolios are useful as a support to new instructional approaches that emphasize the student's role in constructing knowledge and the teacher's role in promoting this process. For example, in writing instruction, portfolios can function to illustrate the range of assignments, goals, and audiences for which a student produced written material. In addition, portfolios can be a record of the activities undertaken over time in the development of written products. They can also be used to support cooperative teaming by offering an opportunity for students to share and comment on each other's work. For example, a videotape of students speaking French in the classroom can be used to evoke a critical evaluation of each other's conversational skills at various points during the school year. Recent changes in education policy, which emphasize greater teacher involvement in designing curriculum and assessing students, have also been an impetus to increased portfolio use. Portfolios are valued as an assessment tool because, as representations of classroom-based performance, they can be fully integrated into the curriculum. And unlike separate tests, they supplement rather than take time away from instruction. Moreover, many teachers, educators, and researchers believe that portfolio assessments are more effective than "old-style" tests for measuring academic skills and informing instructional decisions. WHY TRY IT? Students have been stuffing assignments in notebooks and folders for years, so what's so new and exciting about portfolios? Portfolios capitalize on students' natural tendency to save work and become an effective way to get them to take a second look and think about how they could improve future work. As any teacher or student can confirm, this method is a clear departure from the old write, hand in, and forget mentality, where first drafts were considered final products. HOW DOES IT WORK? Although there is no single correct way to develop portfolio programs, in all of them students are expected to collect, select, and reflect. Early in the school year, students are pressed to consider: What would I like to reread or share with my parents or a friend? What makes a particular piece of writing, an approach to a mathematics problem, or a write-up of a science project a good product? In building a portfolio of selected pieces and explaining the basis for their choices, students generate criteria for good work, with teacher and peer input. Students need specifics with clear guidelines and examples to get started on their work, so these discussions need to be well guided and structured. The earlier the discussions begin, the better. While portfolios were developed on the model of the visual and performing arts tradition of showcasing accomplishments, portfolios in classrooms today are a highly flexible instructional and assessment tool, adaptable to diverse curricula, student age/grade levels, and administrative contexts. For example: The content in portfolios is built from class assignments and as such corresponds to the local classroom curriculum. Often, portfolio programs are initiated by teachers, who know their classroom curriculum best. They may develop portfolios focused on a single curricular area--such as writing, mathematics, literature, or science--or they may develop portfolio programs that span two or more subjects, such as writing and reading, writing across the curriculum, or mathematics and science. Still others span several course areas for particular groups of students, such as those in vocational-technical, English as a second language, or special arts programs. The age/grade level of students may determine how portfolios are developed and used. For example, in developing criteria for judging good writing, older students are more likely to be able to help determine the criteria by which work is selected, perhaps through brainstorming sessions with the teacher and other students. Younger students may need more directed help to decide on what work to include. Older students are generally better at keeping logs to report their progress on readings and other recurrent projects. Also, older students often expand their portfolios beyond written material to include photographs or videos of peer review sessions, science experiments, performances, or exhibits. Administrative contexts also influence the structure and use of portfolios. While the primary purpose of portfolios for most teachers is to engage students, support good curricula and instruction, and improve student teaming, some portfolio programs are designed to serve other purposes as well. For example, portfolios can be used to involve parents in their children's education programs and to report individual student progress. Teachers and administrators need to educate parents about how portfolios work and what advantages they offer over traditional tests. Parents are generally more receptive if the traditional tests to which they are accustomed are not being eliminated. Once portfolios are explained and observed in practice, parents are often enthusiastic supporters. Portfolios may also be used to compare achievement across classrooms or schools. When they are used for this purpose, fairness requires that standards be developed to specify the types of work that can be included and the criteria used to evaluate the work. Guidelines may also address issues of teacher or peer involvement in revising draft work or in deciding on what to identify as a best piece. In all administrative contexts, teachers need administrative support to initiate a portfolio program. They need support material such as folders, file drawers, and access to a photocopy machine, and time to plan, share ideas, and develop strategies. All portfolios--across these diverse curricular settings, student populations, and administrative contexts--involve students in their own education so that they take charge of their personal collection of work, reflect on what makes some work better, and use this information to make improvements in future work. WHAT DOES THE RESEARCH SAY? Research shows that students at all levels see assessment as something that is done to them on their classwork by someone else. Beyond "percent correct," assigned letter grades, and grammatical or arithmetic errors, many students have little knowledge of what is involved in evaluating their classwork. Portfolios can provide structure for involving students in developing and understanding criteria for good efforts, in coming to see the criteria as their own, and in applying the criteria to their own and other students' work. Research also shows that students benefit from an awareness of the processes and strategies involved in writing, solving a problem, researching a topic, analyzing information, or describing their own observations. Without instruction focused on the processes and strategies that underlie effective performance of these types of work, most students will not learn them or will learn them only minimally. And without curriculum-specific experience in using these processes and strategies, even fewer students will carry them forward into new and appropriate contexts. Portfolios can serve as a vehicle for enhancing student awareness of these strategies for thinking about and producing work--both inside and beyond the classroom. WHAT ARE THE DRAWBACKS? Good portfolio projects do not happen without considerable effort on the part of teachers, administrators, and policymakers. Research shows that portfolios place additional demands on teachers and students as well as on school resources. Teachers need not only a thorough understanding of their subject area and instructional skills, but also additional time for planning, conferring with other teachers, developing strategies and materials, meeting with individual students and small groups, and reviewing and commenting on student work. In addition, teachers may need extra space in their classrooms to store students' portfolios or expensive equipment such as video cameras. So, if you are considering student portfolios as a means of assessment, the preceding may suggest criteria by which you may make a prudent decision. There are many opinions about value of student portfolios and you are encouraged to gather as much information as possible before making any decision. Adapted from "Student Portfolios: Classroom Uses" Office of Education Research Consumer Guide, Number 9, 1993. Office of Research, Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) of the U.S. Department of Education.
What Is a Rubric?
A rubric is a scoring tool that lists the criteria for a piece of work, or "what counts" (for example, purpose, organization, details, voice, and mechanics are often what count in a piece of writing); it also articulates gradations of quality for each criterion, from excellent to poor. The term defies a dictionary definition, but it seems to have established itself, so I continue to use it.
The example in Figure 1 (adapted from Perkins et al 1994) lists the criteria and gradations of quality for verbal, written, or graphic reports on student inventions - for instance, inventions designed to ease the Westward journey for 19th century pioneers for instance, or to solve a local environmental problem, or to represent an imaginary culture and its inhabitants, or anything else students might invent.
This rubric lists the criteria in the column on the left: The report must explain (1) the purposes of the invention, (2) the features or parts of the invention and how they help it serve its purposes, (3) the pros and cons of the design, and (4) how the design connects to other things past, present, and future. The rubric could easily include criteria related to presentation style and effectiveness, the mechanics of written pieces, and the quality of the invention itself.
The four columns to the right of the criteria describe varying degrees of quality, from excellent to poor. As concisely as possible, these columns explain what makes a good piece of work good and a bad one bad.
Figure One RUBRIC FOR AN INVENTION REPORT
Criteria
Quality
Purposes
The report explains the key purposes of the invention and points out less obvious ones as well.
The report explains all of the key purposes of the invention.
The report explains some of the purposes of the invention but misses key purposes.
The report does not refer to the purposes of the invention.
Features
The report details both key and hidden features of the invention and explains how they serve several purposes.
The report details the key features of the invention and explains the purposes they serve.
The report neglects some features of the invention or the purposes they serve.
The report does not detail the features of the invention or the purposes they serve.
Critique
The report discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the invention, and suggests ways in which it can be improved.
The report discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the invention.
The report discusses either the strengths or weaknesses of the invention but not both.
The report does not mention the strengths or the weaknesses of the invention.
Connections
The report makes appropriate connections between the purposes and features of the invention and many different kinds of phenomena.
The report makes appropriate connections between the purposes and features of the invention and one or two phenomena.
The report makes unclear or inappropriate connections between the invention and other phenomena.
The report makes no connections between the invention and other things.
Why Use Rubrics?
Rubrics appeal to teachers and students for many reasons. First, they are powerful tools for both teaching and assessment. Rubrics can improve student performance, as well as monitor it, by making teachers' expectations clear and by showing students how to meet these expectations. The result is often marked improvements in the quality of student work and in learning. Thus, the most common argument for using rubrics is they help define "quality." One student actually didn't like rubrics for this very reason: "If you get something wrong," she said, "your teacher can prove you knew what you were supposed to do!" (Marcus 1995).
A second reason that rubrics are useful is that they help students become more thoughtful judges of the quality of their own and others' work. When rubrics are used to guide self- and peer-assessment, students become increasingly able to spot and solve problems in their own and one another's work. Repeated practice with peer-assessment, and especially self-assessment, increases students' sense of responsibility for their own work and cuts down on the number of "Am I done yet?" questions.
Third, rubrics reduce the amount of time teachers spend evaluating student work. Teachers tend to find that by the time a piece has been self- and peer-assessed according to a rubric, they have little left to say about it. When they do have something to say, they can often simply circle an item in the rubric, rather than struggling to explain the flaw or strength they have noticed and figuring out what to suggest in terms of improvements. Rubrics provide students with more informative feedback about their strengths and areas in need of improvement.
Fourth, teachers appreciate rubrics because their "accordion" nature allows them to accommodate heterogeneous classes. The examples here have three or four gradations of quality, but there is no reason they can't be "stretched" to reflect the work of both gifted students and those with learning disabilities.
Finally, rubrics are easy to use and to explain. Christine Hall, a fourth grade teacher, reflected on how both students and parents responded to her use of rubrics:
Students were able to articulate what they had learned, and by the end of the year could be accurate with their evaluations. Parents were very excited about the use of rubrics. During parent conferences I used sample rubrics to explain to parents their purpose, and how they were used in class. The reaction of parents was very encouraging. They knew exactly what their child needed to do to be successful.
How Do You Create Rubrics?
Rubrics are becoming increasingly popular with educators moving toward more authentic, performance- based assessments. Recent publications contain some rubrics (Brewer 1996; Marzano et al 1993). Chances are, however, that you will have to develop a few of your own rubrics to reflect your own curriculum and teaching style. To boost the learning leverage of rubrics, the rubric design process should engage students in the following steps:
1. Look at models: Show students examples of good and not-so-good work. Identify the characteristics that make the good ones good and the bad ones bad.
2. List criteria: Use the discussion of models to begin a list of what counts in quality work.
3. Articulate gradations of quality: Describe the best and worst levels of quality, then fill in the middle levels based on your knowledge of common problems and the discussion of not-so-good work.
4. Practice on models: Have students use the rubrics to evaluate the models you gave them in Step 1.
5. Use self- and peer-assessment: Give students their assignment. As they work, stop them occasionally for self- and peer-assessment.
6. Revise: Always give students time to revise their work based on the feedback they get in Step 5.
7. Use teacher assessment: Use the same rubric students used to assess their work yourself.
Step 1 may be necessary only when you are asking students to engage in a task with which they are unfamiliar. Steps 3 and 4 are useful but time-consuming; you can do these on your own, especially when you've been using rubrics for a while. A class experienced in rubric-based assessment can streamline the process so that it begins with listing criteria, after which the teacher writes out the gradations of quality, checks them with the students, makes revisions, then uses the rubric for self-, peer-, and teacher assessment.
Ann Tanona, a second grade teacher, went through the seven-step process with her students. The result was a rubric for assessing videotaped Reading Rainbow-style "book talks" (fig. 2).
Difficult to understand- 6-inch voice or screeching
Tips on Designing Rubrics
Ann's rubric is powerful because it articulates the characteristics of a good "book talk" in students' own words. It also demonstrates some of the difficulties of designing a good rubric.
Perhaps the most common challenge is avoiding unclear language, such as "creative beginning." If a rubric is to teach as well as evaluate, terms like these must be defined for students. Admittedly, creative is a difficult word to define. Ann handled this problem by having a discussion of what the term "creative beginning" meant in the book talks. Patricia Crosby and Pamela Heinz, both seventh grade teachers, solved the same problem in a rubric for oral presentations by actually listing ways in which students could meet the criterion (fig. 3). This approach provides valuable information to students on how to begin a talk and avoids the need to define elusive terms like creative.
Figure 3 RUBRIC FOR AN ORAL PRESENTATION
Criterion
Quality
Gains attention of audience.
Gives details or an amusing fact, a series of questions, a short demonstration, a colorful visual or a personal reason why they picked this topic.
Does a one- or two-sentence introduction, then starts speech.
Does not attempt to gain attention of audience, just starts speech.
A second challenge in rubric design is avoiding unnecessarily negative language. The excerpt from the rubric in Figure 3 avoids words like boring by describing what was done during a so-so beginning to a talk and implicitly comparing it with the highest level of quality. Thus, students know exactly what they did wrong and how they can do better next time, not just that the opening to their talk was boring.
Articulating gradations of quality is often a challenge. It helps if you spend a lot of time thinking about criteria and how best to chunk them before going on to define the levels of quality. You might also try a clever technique I have borrowed from a fifth grade teacher in Gloucester, Massachusetts. She describes gradations of quality as: "Yes," "Yes but," "No but," and "No." For example, Figure 4 shows part of a rubric for evaluating a scrapbook that documents a story. This approach tends to work well, as long as you aren't too rigid about it. Rigidity can have amusing results: One student wrote out the lowest level of quality for the criterion, "Is it anachronism free?" this way: "No, I did not remember to not use anachronism"!
Figure 4 RUBRIC FOR EVALUATING A SCRAPBOOK
Criterion
Quality
Gives enough details.
Yes, I put in enough details to give the reader a sense of time, place, and events.
Yes, I put in some details, but some key details are missing.
No, I didn't put in enough details, but I did include a few.
No, I had almost no details.
What to Do Once You've Created Rubrics
Creating rubrics is the hard part - using them is relatively easy. Once you've created a rubric, give copies to students and ask them to assess their own progress on a task or project. Their assessments should not count toward a grade. The point is for the rubric to help students learn more and produce better final products, so including self-assessments in grades is unnecessary and can compromise students' honesty.
Always give students time to revise their work after assessing themselves, then have them assess one another's work. Peer-assessment takes some getting used to. Emphasize the fact that peer-assessment, like self-assessment, is intended to help everyone do better work. You may also need to hold students accountable for their assessments of a classmate's work by having them sign off on the rubric they use. You can then see how fair and accurate their feedback is, and you can ask for evidence that supports their opinions when their assess-ments don't match yours. Again, giving time for revision after peer-assessment is crucial.
Parents can use rubrics to help their children with their homework. Finally, when you assess student work, use the same rubric that was used for self- and peer-assessment. When you hand the marked rubric back with the students' work, they'll know what they did well and what they need to work on in the future.
Grading (if you must) is also relatively easy with rubrics. A piece of work that reflects the highest level of quality for each criterion obviously deserves an A, one that consistently falls in the lowest level is a D or F, and so on. Because one piece of work rarely falls in only one level of quality, many teachers average out the levels of quality, either formally or informally.
Rubrics can also be included in portfolios. However you use them, the idea is to support and to evaluate student learning. Students, as well as teachers, should respond to the use of rubrics by thinking, "Yes, this is what I need!"
References
Brewer, R. (1996). Exemplars: A Teacher's Solution. Underhill, VT: Exemplars.
Marcus, J. (1995). "Data on the Impact of Alternative Assessment on Students." Unpublished manuscript. The Education Cooperative, Wellesley, MA.
Marzano, R., D. Pickering, and J. McTighe (1993). Assessing Student Outcomes: Performance Assessment Using the Dimensions of Learning Model. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
Perkins, D., H. Goodrich, S. Tishman, and J. Mirman Owen (1994). Thinking Connections: Learning to Think and Thinking to Learn. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Heidi Goodrich Andrade is an assistant professor at the College of Education, Ohio University.
She worked for 10 years as a principal investigator at Project Zero in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she directed two projects: (1) the Student Self-Assessment project, funded by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, and (2) the Concordia Community Planning project, funded by Concordia, Inc. Her work centers on cognitive development, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between thinking, learning and assessment. OTHER RUBRICS from Heidi Goodrich AndradePersuasive Essay Prompt and Rubric
The State of California has a law that all students must be educated until they are 16 years old. This law passed after some debate. Some people thought it was a good law, some didn't. Put yourself in these lawmakers' shoes and argue either for or against this law.
In a 5-paragraph essay, be sure to:
-- form an opinion on this issue and support it with strong arguments and relevant information.
-- use your knowledge of democracy to explain how having or not having such a law would affect a democratic society like ours.
PERSUASIVE ESSAY RUBRIC
Criteria
Quality
4
3
2
1
Make a claim
I make a claim and explain why it is controversial.
I make a claim but don't explain why it is controversial.
I make a claim but it is buried, confused, or unclear.
I do not make a claim.
Give reasons in support of the claim
I give clear and accurate reasons in support of the claim.
I give reasons in support of the claim, but overlook important reasons.
I give 1 or 2 reasons which don't support the claim well, and/or irrelevant or confusing reasons.
I do not give convincing reasons in support of the claim.
Consider reasons against the claim
I thoroughly discuss reasons against the claim and explain why the claim is valid anyway.
I discuss reasons against claim, but leave out important reasons and/or don't explain why the claim still stands.
I acknowledge that there are reasons against the claim but don't explain them.
I do not give reasons against the claim.
Relate the claim to democracy
I discuss how democratic principles and democracy can be used both in support of and against the claim.
I discuss how democratic principles and democracy can be used to support the claim.
I say that democracy and democratic principles are relevant but do not explain how or why clearly.
I do not mention democratic principles or democracy.
Organization
My writing is well organized, has a compelling opening, strong informative body and satisfying conclusion. Has appropriate paragraph format.
My writing has a clear beginning, middle and end. I generally use appropriate paragraph format.
My writing is usually organized but sometimes gets off topic. Has several errors in paragraph format.
My writing is aimless and disorganized.
Word choice
The words I use are striking but natural, varied and vivid.
I use mostly routine words.
My words are dull, uninspired or they sound like I am trying too hard to impress.
I use the same words over and over and over.... Some words may be confusing.
Sentence Fluency
My sentences are clear, complete and of different lengths.
I wrote well-constructed but routine sentences.
My sentences are often flat or awkward. Some run-ons and fragments.
Many run-ons, fragments and awkward phrasings make my essay hard to read.
Conventions
I use first-person form, and I use correct sentence structure, grammar, punctuation and spelling.
My spelling is correct on common words. some erros in grammar and punctuation. I need to revise it again.
Frequent errors are distracting to the reader but do not interfere with the meaning of my paper.
Many errors in grammar, capitalization, spelling and punctuation make my paper hard to read.
Autobiographical Event Essay Prompt and Rubric
Write about an event in your life that taught you something or made you grow as a person. Tell the story in a way that will let your readers enter into it and understand what it meant to you.
Planning
Portfolios take a lot of planning to set a very clear purpose before introducing portfolios to the students and parents. My purpose was to provide evidence that students were recognizing and taking advantage of opportunities to see, use, learn about, and experience French culture outside the classroom. I also needed to set goals; mine were developing enthusiasm for the language and developing life-long learning skills. My hidden agenda was to get parents and the community involved in the children's learning.I think it is crucial to prepare thoroughly and spend a lot of time with students introducing portfolios. During the first three days of the school year I spent a lot of class time talking about the structure and expectations of the class. I gave the students handouts on concerns, needs, and definitions and told them to share these with their parents and to refer to them throughout the year.
If you are going to use portfolios, start slowly. The first step is having students collect everything they do in a folder. After a while, you can start giving portfolio days, on which students work on their portfolios by revising, adding self-assessments, annotating and organizing. Later, I let the students pick one day of the week to work on portfolios; they chose Friday. I had them give me a written plan of action and a goal on each Monday preceding the portfolio Friday. The students who had not submitted this note were given assigned work. By the fourth quarter, I did not make them give me the cards, because they had learned how to set goals by themselves.
While the students were working on their portfolios, I worked with individual students and gave mini-lessons when difficulties and questions came up while they were working. I would announce to the class that I was giving a mini-lesson in a corner on one of the blackboards. If they did not want the information, they could keep working. They really liked the mini-lessons.
Portfolio contents
I required work in each of the four language skill areas, but each student had to decide how to demonstrate these skills. Listening was very difficult to assess; I tried to take into account what they listened to, for how long, and what they learned from the listening experience, not how much they had actually understood of what they had listened to. For example, one student found a French-language radio station, so I made tapes from that and lent them out to students. They had a hard time understanding, but my teaching point was that even if a student had understood very little, he had learned something about his learning. In this case, we talked about developing strategies for listening. In the area of writing, I started by asking for a paragraph or more for each assignment; this length increased over time. Some students simply could not do this (the students in the class were from the general school population and included main streamed special education students), so we talked about it as a class, so that there would be no sense of "why does that student not have to do this." We discussed the fact that everyone has learning strengths and weaknesses. I tried to turn this potentially difficult situation into a positive experience in which students actively participated in self- and peer-assessment and reinforced their identity as a community of learners.Evaluation
I believe in having clearly set and adhered to criteria and in being very honest with students about their work and its acceptability. In the first quarter, I set the criteria myself because the students had no experience with that. At the beginning of the second quarter, we talked about portfolio criteria and defining criteria and then voted on the criteria for that quarter. I kept the criteria that all four skill areas be represented, and students chose effort, organization, planning, and "going further than you thought you could" as criteria. This gave them responsibility for learning and self-assessment.I included conferences in my portfolio evaluation. In the first quarter, I required all the students to have a conference with me. This was very time consuming, so in the second quarter I required students with last names A-K to have conferences and made them optional for all other students. In the third quarter, I had conferences with all the students who had last names between L-Z and made conferences optional for all the other students. In the final quarter, I arranged with my principal to have covered release time for an entire day, so that I could have a conference with each student.
Parental involvement
Students were also required to have a portfolio conference with a parent each quarter before they gave me the portfolio. Parents were supposed to write a paragraph about the portfolio/conference. I did not grade portfolios which did not contain these parent paragraphs. In situations in which there was no parent present, I let students have a conference with an adult relative or another teacher. If students reported that their parents had no time, I called the parents and encouraged them to have a conference with their child, and this worked. I also offered a parent workshop on portfolios at the beginning of the year to inform parents of the agenda and why and how to get involved.Outcomes
Creating portfolios shows students what they are good at and what they need to work on. Self-assessment is an important skill learned through portfolio use. The students learned how to look for specific criteria that made their work acceptable or not. In the beginning, students would just rate a piece "good" or "bad" but have no idea why; in the end, they had learned how to judge their own work and how to revise it. I am an enthusiastic supporter of portfolios, and by the end of the year all the students had bought into portfolios, too. Five of the students ended the fourth quarter one year above level, most were on level, and there were two or three strugglers.What is Portfolio Assessment?
Portfolios have generated a good deal of interest in recent years, with teachers taking the lead in exploring ways to use them. Teachers have integrated portfolios into instruction and assessment, gained administrative support, and answered their own as well as student, administrator, and parent questions about portfolio assessment. Concerns are often focused on reliability, validity, process, evaluation, and time. These concerns apply equally to other assessment instruments. There is no assessment instrument that meets every teacher's purpose perfectly, is entirely valid and reliable, takes no time to prepare, administer, or grade, and meets each student's learning style.
Foreign language educators need to able to choose and/or design assessments that meet their most important instructional and assessment needs and which they have the resources to implement and evaluate. Below are some strengths of portfolio assessment, seen in contrast to traditional forms of assessment. Traditional assessment vs Portfolio assessment
Why use portfolio assessment?
Student's Portfolio
Electronic portfolios that use digital storage processes have largely replaced the more traditional paper type as the need to present not just information, but sound, motion, and color has become the standard. Whether in the many varieties of digital format, such as DVDs, CDs, the Internet, personal websites, flash drives, or printed on paper, portfolios are used in almost every aspect of communicating personal information. Regardless of the format used, many people, especially students and teachers, seeking to understand the need for, or use of portfolios, require information. Be aware though that bad information presented in the most dazzling electronic format is still, well, bad information.
Portfolios are collections of student work representing a selection of products that represent specific student performance. Portfolios in classrooms today are derived from the visual and performing arts tradition in which they serve to showcase artists' accomplishments and personally favored works. A portfolio may be a folder containing a student's best pieces and the student's evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the pieces. It may also contain one or more works-in-progress that illustrate the creation of a product, such as an essay, evolving through various stages of conception, drafting, and revision.
Many teachers are using portfolios in all curricular areas. Portfolios are useful as a support to new instructional approaches that emphasize the student's role in constructing knowledge and the teacher's role in promoting this process. For example, in writing instruction, portfolios can function to illustrate the range of assignments, goals, and audiences for which a student produced written material. In addition, portfolios can be a record of the activities undertaken over time in the development of written products. They can also be used to support cooperative teaming by offering an opportunity for students to share and comment on each other's work. For example, a videotape of students speaking French in the classroom can be used to evoke a critical evaluation of each other's conversational skills at various points during the school year.
Recent changes in education policy, which emphasize greater teacher involvement in designing curriculum and assessing students, have also been an impetus to increased portfolio use. Portfolios are valued as an assessment tool because, as representations of classroom-based performance, they can be fully integrated into the curriculum. And unlike separate tests, they supplement rather than take time away from instruction. Moreover, many teachers, educators, and researchers believe that portfolio assessments are more effective than "old-style" tests for measuring academic skills and informing instructional decisions.
WHY TRY IT? Students have been stuffing assignments in notebooks and folders for years, so what's so new and exciting about portfolios? Portfolios capitalize on students' natural tendency to save work and become an effective way to get them to take a second look and think about how they could improve future work. As any teacher or student can confirm, this method is a clear departure from the old write, hand in, and forget mentality, where first drafts were considered final products.
HOW DOES IT WORK? Although there is no single correct way to develop portfolio programs, in all of them students are expected to collect, select, and reflect. Early in the school year, students are pressed to consider: What would I like to reread or share with my parents or a friend? What makes a particular piece of writing, an approach to a mathematics problem, or a write-up of a science project a good product? In building a portfolio of selected pieces and explaining the basis for their choices, students generate criteria for good work, with teacher and peer input. Students need specifics with clear guidelines and examples to get started on their work, so these discussions need to be well guided and structured. The earlier the discussions begin, the better.
While portfolios were developed on the model of the visual and performing arts tradition of showcasing accomplishments, portfolios in classrooms today are a highly flexible instructional and assessment tool, adaptable to diverse curricula, student age/grade levels, and administrative contexts. For example:
The content in portfolios is built from class assignments and as such corresponds to the local classroom curriculum. Often, portfolio programs are initiated by teachers, who know their classroom curriculum best. They may develop portfolios focused on a single curricular area--such as writing, mathematics, literature, or science--or they may develop portfolio programs that span two or more subjects, such as writing and reading, writing across the curriculum, or mathematics and science. Still others span several course areas for particular groups of students, such as those in vocational-technical, English as a second language, or special arts programs.
The age/grade level of students may determine how portfolios are developed and used. For example, in developing criteria for judging good writing, older students are more likely to be able to help determine the criteria by which work is selected, perhaps through brainstorming sessions with the teacher and other students. Younger students may need more directed help to decide on what work to include. Older students are generally better at keeping logs to report their progress on readings and other recurrent projects. Also, older students often expand their portfolios beyond written material to include photographs or videos of peer review sessions, science experiments, performances, or exhibits.
Administrative contexts also influence the structure and use of portfolios. While the primary purpose of portfolios for most teachers is to engage students, support good curricula and instruction, and improve student teaming, some portfolio programs are designed to serve other purposes as well. For example, portfolios can be used to involve parents in their children's education programs and to report individual student progress. Teachers and administrators need to educate parents about how portfolios work and what advantages they offer over traditional tests. Parents are generally more receptive if the traditional tests to which they are accustomed are not being eliminated. Once portfolios are explained and observed in practice, parents are often enthusiastic supporters.
Portfolios may also be used to compare achievement across classrooms or schools. When they are used for this purpose, fairness requires that standards be developed to specify the types of work that can be included and the criteria used to evaluate the work. Guidelines may also address issues of teacher or peer involvement in revising draft work or in deciding on what to identify as a best piece.
In all administrative contexts, teachers need administrative support to initiate a portfolio program. They need support material such as folders, file drawers, and access to a photocopy machine, and time to plan, share ideas, and develop strategies.
All portfolios--across these diverse curricular settings, student populations, and administrative contexts--involve students in their own education so that they take charge of their personal collection of work, reflect on what makes some work better, and use this information to make improvements in future work.
WHAT DOES THE RESEARCH SAY? Research shows that students at all levels see assessment as something that is done to them on their classwork by someone else. Beyond "percent correct," assigned letter grades, and grammatical or arithmetic errors, many students have little knowledge of what is involved in evaluating their classwork. Portfolios can provide structure for involving students in developing and understanding criteria for good efforts, in coming to see the criteria as their own, and in applying the criteria to their own and other students' work.
Research also shows that students benefit from an awareness of the processes and strategies involved in writing, solving a problem, researching a topic, analyzing information, or describing their own observations. Without instruction focused on the processes and strategies that underlie effective performance of these types of work, most students will not learn them or will learn them only minimally. And without curriculum-specific experience in using these processes and strategies, even fewer students will carry them forward into new and appropriate contexts. Portfolios can serve as a vehicle for enhancing student awareness of these strategies for thinking about and producing work--both inside and beyond the classroom.
WHAT ARE THE DRAWBACKS? Good portfolio projects do not happen without considerable effort on the part of teachers, administrators, and policymakers. Research shows that portfolios place additional demands on teachers and students as well as on school resources. Teachers need not only a thorough understanding of their subject area and instructional skills, but also additional time for planning, conferring with other teachers, developing strategies and materials, meeting with individual students and small groups, and reviewing and commenting on student work. In addition, teachers may need extra space in their classrooms to store students' portfolios or expensive equipment such as video cameras.
So, if you are considering student portfolios as a means of assessment, the preceding may suggest criteria by which you may make a prudent decision. There are many opinions about value of student portfolios and you are encouraged to gather as much information as possible before making any decision.
Adapted from "Student Portfolios: Classroom Uses" Office of Education Research Consumer Guide, Number 9, 1993. Office of Research, Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) of the U.S. Department of Education.
What Is a Rubric?
A rubric is a scoring tool that lists the criteria for a piece of work, or "what counts" (for example, purpose, organization, details, voice, and mechanics are often what count in a piece of writing); it also articulates gradations of quality for each criterion, from excellent to poor. The term defies a dictionary definition, but it seems to have established itself, so I continue to use it.
The example in Figure 1 (adapted from Perkins et al 1994) lists the criteria and gradations of quality for verbal, written, or graphic reports on student inventions - for instance, inventions designed to ease the Westward journey for 19th century pioneers for instance, or to solve a local environmental problem, or to represent an imaginary culture and its inhabitants, or anything else students might invent.
This rubric lists the criteria in the column on the left: The report must explain (1) the purposes of the invention, (2) the features or parts of the invention and how they help it serve its purposes, (3) the pros and cons of the design, and (4) how the design connects to other things past, present, and future. The rubric could easily include criteria related to presentation style and effectiveness, the mechanics of written pieces, and the quality of the invention itself.
The four columns to the right of the criteria describe varying degrees of quality, from excellent to poor. As concisely as possible, these columns explain what makes a good piece of work good and a bad one bad.
Criteria
Purposes
Features
Critique
Connections
Why Use Rubrics?
Rubrics appeal to teachers and students for many reasons. First, they are powerful tools for both teaching and assessment. Rubrics can improve student performance, as well as monitor it, by making teachers' expectations clear and by showing students how to meet these expectations. The result is often marked improvements in the quality of student work and in learning. Thus, the most common argument for using rubrics is they help define "quality." One student actually didn't like rubrics for this very reason: "If you get something wrong," she said, "your teacher can prove you knew what you were supposed to do!" (Marcus 1995).
A second reason that rubrics are useful is that they help students become more thoughtful judges of the quality of their own and others' work. When rubrics are used to guide self- and peer-assessment, students become increasingly able to spot and solve problems in their own and one another's work. Repeated practice with peer-assessment, and especially self-assessment, increases students' sense of responsibility for their own work and cuts down on the number of "Am I done yet?" questions.
Third, rubrics reduce the amount of time teachers spend evaluating student work. Teachers tend to find that by the time a piece has been self- and peer-assessed according to a rubric, they have little left to say about it. When they do have something to say, they can often simply circle an item in the rubric, rather than struggling to explain the flaw or strength they have noticed and figuring out what to suggest in terms of improvements. Rubrics provide students with more informative feedback about their strengths and areas in need of improvement.
Fourth, teachers appreciate rubrics because their "accordion" nature allows them to accommodate heterogeneous classes. The examples here have three or four gradations of quality, but there is no reason they can't be "stretched" to reflect the work of both gifted students and those with learning disabilities.
Finally, rubrics are easy to use and to explain. Christine Hall, a fourth grade teacher, reflected on how both students and parents responded to her use of rubrics:
Students were able to articulate what they had learned, and by the end of the year could be accurate with their evaluations. Parents were very excited about the use of rubrics. During parent conferences I used sample rubrics to explain to parents their purpose, and how they were used in class. The reaction of parents was very encouraging. They knew exactly what their child needed to do to be successful.
How Do You Create Rubrics?
Rubrics are becoming increasingly popular with educators moving toward more authentic, performance- based assessments. Recent publications contain some rubrics (Brewer 1996; Marzano et al 1993). Chances are, however, that you will have to develop a few of your own rubrics to reflect your own curriculum and teaching style. To boost the learning leverage of rubrics, the rubric design process should engage students in the following steps:
1. Look at models: Show students examples of good and not-so-good work. Identify the characteristics that make the good ones good and the bad ones bad.
2. List criteria: Use the discussion of models to begin a list of what counts in quality work.
3. Articulate gradations of quality: Describe the best and worst levels of quality, then fill in the middle levels based on your knowledge of common problems and the discussion of not-so-good work.
4. Practice on models: Have students use the rubrics to evaluate the models you gave them in Step 1.
5. Use self- and peer-assessment: Give students their assignment. As they work, stop them occasionally for self- and peer-assessment.
6. Revise: Always give students time to revise their work based on the feedback they get in Step 5.
7. Use teacher assessment: Use the same rubric students used to assess their work yourself.
Step 1 may be necessary only when you are asking students to engage in a task with which they are unfamiliar. Steps 3 and 4 are useful but time-consuming; you can do these on your own, especially when you've been using rubrics for a while. A class experienced in rubric-based assessment can streamline the process so that it begins with listing criteria, after which the teacher writes out the gradations of quality, checks them with the students, makes revisions, then uses the rubric for self-, peer-, and teacher assessment.
Ann Tanona, a second grade teacher, went through the seven-step process with her students. The result was a rubric for assessing videotaped Reading Rainbow-style "book talks" (fig. 2).
Criteria
Quality
Did I get my audience's attention?
Tips on Designing Rubrics
Ann's rubric is powerful because it articulates the characteristics of a good "book talk" in students' own words. It also demonstrates some of the difficulties of designing a good rubric.
Perhaps the most common challenge is avoiding unclear language, such as "creative beginning." If a rubric is to teach as well as evaluate, terms like these must be defined for students. Admittedly, creative is a difficult word to define. Ann handled this problem by having a discussion of what the term "creative beginning" meant in the book talks. Patricia Crosby and Pamela Heinz, both seventh grade teachers, solved the same problem in a rubric for oral presentations by actually listing ways in which students could meet the criterion (fig. 3). This approach provides valuable information to students on how to begin a talk and avoids the need to define elusive terms like creative.
Criterion
Quality
A second challenge in rubric design is avoiding unnecessarily negative language. The excerpt from the rubric in Figure 3 avoids words like boring by describing what was done during a so-so beginning to a talk and implicitly comparing it with the highest level of quality. Thus, students know exactly what they did wrong and how they can do better next time, not just that the opening to their talk was boring.
Articulating gradations of quality is often a challenge. It helps if you spend a lot of time thinking about criteria and how best to chunk them before going on to define the levels of quality. You might also try a clever technique I have borrowed from a fifth grade teacher in Gloucester, Massachusetts. She describes gradations of quality as: "Yes," "Yes but," "No but," and "No." For example, Figure 4 shows part of a rubric for evaluating a scrapbook that documents a story. This approach tends to work well, as long as you aren't too rigid about it. Rigidity can have amusing results: One student wrote out the lowest level of quality for the criterion, "Is it anachronism free?" this way: "No, I did not remember to not use anachronism"!
Criterion
Quality
What to Do Once You've Created Rubrics
Creating rubrics is the hard part - using them is relatively easy. Once you've created a rubric, give copies to students and ask them to assess their own progress on a task or project. Their assessments should not count toward a grade. The point is for the rubric to help students learn more and produce better final products, so including self-assessments in grades is unnecessary and can compromise students' honesty.
Always give students time to revise their work after assessing themselves, then have them assess one another's work. Peer-assessment takes some getting used to. Emphasize the fact that peer-assessment, like self-assessment, is intended to help everyone do better work. You may also need to hold students accountable for their assessments of a classmate's work by having them sign off on the rubric they use. You can then see how fair and accurate their feedback is, and you can ask for evidence that supports their opinions when their assess-ments don't match yours. Again, giving time for revision after peer-assessment is crucial.
Parents can use rubrics to help their children with their homework. Finally, when you assess student work, use the same rubric that was used for self- and peer-assessment. When you hand the marked rubric back with the students' work, they'll know what they did well and what they need to work on in the future.
Grading (if you must) is also relatively easy with rubrics. A piece of work that reflects the highest level of quality for each criterion obviously deserves an A, one that consistently falls in the lowest level is a D or F, and so on. Because one piece of work rarely falls in only one level of quality, many teachers average out the levels of quality, either formally or informally.
Rubrics can also be included in portfolios. However you use them, the idea is to support and to evaluate student learning. Students, as well as teachers, should respond to the use of rubrics by thinking, "Yes, this is what I need!"
References
Brewer, R. (1996). Exemplars: A Teacher's Solution. Underhill, VT: Exemplars.
Marcus, J. (1995). "Data on the Impact of Alternative Assessment on Students." Unpublished manuscript. The Education Cooperative, Wellesley, MA.
Marzano, R., D. Pickering, and J. McTighe (1993). Assessing Student Outcomes: Performance Assessment Using the Dimensions of Learning Model. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
Perkins, D., H. Goodrich, S. Tishman, and J. Mirman Owen (1994). Thinking Connections: Learning to Think and Thinking to Learn. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Heidi Goodrich Andrade is an assistant professor at the College of Education, Ohio University.
She worked for 10 years as a principal investigator at Project Zero in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she directed two projects: (1) the Student Self-Assessment project, funded by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, and (2) the Concordia Community Planning project, funded by Concordia, Inc. Her work centers on cognitive development, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between thinking, learning and assessment.
OTHER RUBRICS from Heidi Goodrich AndradePersuasive Essay Prompt and Rubric
The State of California has a law that all students must be educated until they are 16 years old. This law passed after some debate. Some people thought it was a good law, some didn't. Put yourself in these lawmakers' shoes and argue either for or against this law.
In a 5-paragraph essay, be sure to:
-- form an opinion on this issue and support it with strong arguments and relevant information.
-- use your knowledge of democracy to explain how having or not having such a law would affect a democratic society like ours.
Criteria
Quality
Autobiographical Event Essay Prompt and Rubric
Write about an event in your life that taught you something or made you grow as a person. Tell the story in a way that will let your readers enter into it and understand what it meant to you.SEE: RUBRIC FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL EVENT ESSAY here.